Quote Of The Day – Spread The Meme Edition

“What’s happening now is a good thing. But then I have to look at the other consequences of our intervention, America’s standing in the rest of the world, the fact that George W. Bush was booed by people attending the pope’s funeral today when they saw him on television. And this is not a radical crowd. These were people out for the pope’s funeral.”

Washington Post reporter Harold Meyerson, appearing on PBS’s NewsHour — April 8, 2005. Note that this “booing” has been sourced to a single AP report, and the AP hasn’t always been a reliable fact gather when it comes to booing crowds and the President. They “fact” Meyerson claims has not (to our knowledge) been confirmed by any other source. None of the networks or other news agencies reported it. Still, no reason for that to get in the way of trying to score some political points…

11 Comments

At this point, there is just no doubt as to which group is which and who passes what information/disinformation onto whom…it’s like a circle game of nonsense by the left media in the U.S., as if they’re subliminally all bothered that the British tabloid press has larger type.

I do believe that this is a great example of a tired old meme: gossip about your neighbor and see how it transpires around a circle of gossipers and presto, you end up with the neighbor is now the Ruler of the World and, oh, yeah, is the ‘anti christ’ who butchers innocents for, um, ‘oil’.

The task here is to confront the gossip mongers. They may be all pretty and sweet in print (Washington Post, L.A. Times, AP for examples) and make appearances on television/radio (PBS for example), but they are still irresponsible gossipers. It’s gossip. It’s the New Left Tabloid behavior. Oh, have you heard that Wonkette is a blog?

Meyerson is not a reporter for the Post, he is editor at large of the American Prospect and political editor of L.A. Weekly who writes a weekly liberal op-ed column at the Post. He’s not an unbiased reporter who would never think of skewing a report to make Bush look bad…. oh, what am I saying?

Well, how about this? Now the infamous AP is reporting in The Seattle Times that the Crowds of mourners for the Pope behaved like angels despite the crush.

“Although there were a few tense moments when authorities closed the line snaking slowly into the basilica earlier this week, and some booing and whistling yesterday when the security screening slowed pilgrims’ admission to St. Peter’s, no major incidents were reported.” Booing and Whistling at St. Peters”.

I also have a similar story from Hi Pakistan, at Kerfuffles where I end saying that “Perhaps Mr. Bush was appearing on the video screens at the same time. (;

Henry…Wonkette is a contrived title created by a marketer who uses the internet for purposes of creating, launching and managing websites that pose as something else…he hires as employees people who then assume some posed “author” position on his website projects and does so for commercial purposes.

Not that commercial effect is wrong on blogs or verboten from the format, but that in this particular case, you have a business who creates websites for profit, then goes about finding and hiring employees to equip those websites, and not always, if initially ever, announcing the plans and arrangements, there by furhtering the ruse, furthering the ethics boundary.

Where Wonkette is concerned, the marketer (a guy named Denton/last name) hired Cox to “be” Wonkette, who then went about “blogging” and such, profitting from what are later found to be faux stats of popularity, all fueled and funneled through Denton’s marketing commercial process, posing as an individual blogger just-who-happened-to-be-on-the-popularity-circuit-by-sudden-explosion-of-interest, while what she was (and was later exposed to be) was an employee of Denton’s equipping a website of his, Wonkette, all designed, managed, and for the most part, researched and actually written by someone else (she’s provided with researchers, web site design, hosting, a salary, and more), while Cox as Wonkette is not at all authoring individual voice, individual content within the same scope or even process as is “blogging” known to be.

It’s not that Cox didn’t design her own website (many bloggers do not, or don’t any longer), it’s that the actual author, in the real sense, of “Wonkette” is Denton, not Cox, while Cox has gone on to also profit from Denton’s marketing machine by being promoted (heavily) to and through and about all manner of marketing and commercial promotions as “a blogger” without nearly any mention of just what her quite intensive limitations as an individual are.

And, to my experience, Cox via Wonkette never made the relationship known but appeared to function as Wonkette up to and until she was “outed” as being a hired hand by Denton, someone filling in the spaces…with a lot of exclamation points, to my view.

The format of blogging was and is, almost always (as in, on average, in tradition and example), the individual work of individuals on their individually created, hosted, and authored sites. A web log by a person who writes their own content or contributes to a group blog on which several individuals write their own content and it’s published by one or a group.

Denton’s approach to and about blogging, as are those sites he offers on the internet, to my view, the spam version of “hi” email…someone posing as who they aren’t (your long lost friend, some prior contact looking for you, etc.), while arranging contact with you for their commercially gainful purposes. In the case of Wonkette, it’s eye candy for the gullible, as is parading Cox around by organizations such as The Brookings Institute as representational of who and what “bloggers” are.

But it DOES make for a precedent by derailment of a format to and toward quite politically intended purposes, by those that fund that process…note that Denton’s up and coming project is the Arianna Huffington “publishing company” project as bloggers among celebrities, celebrities blogging…

It’s another version of Wonkette, arranged to capture the trusting reader (“I’m just a blogger !! like you! or anyone else!!!…”) and to then feign popularity (“hey, my stats!! are huge!!!!because people love! what I write!!…”) while what’s taking place is that they represent receptionist level fronting for the interests Off Shore. And pose as Chairman/men.

Imagine the possibilities if you only had a staff of many. And an accounting department who paid bills you never saw, nor cared about. You’d be “popular,” too!!!!!!!

Not to exclude the Nick Denton-Glen Reynolds-Wonkette relationship, which nearly certainly explains a great deal about “popularity” factors.

I don’t mind popularity factors, not at all, nor entertainment, not hardly, but what I do mind is people tweaking appearances to such an extent that, well, you get Michael Moore as “a documentarian” and Wonkette as being a political reportage blog. Most readers appear to just fall for the first explanation and that then leads to unfortunately opinionated perspectives, and Wikipedia, and the NYTimes, and…

For people who are lauded as being academics, you’d think they could at least discern one genre from another.